Attitudes toward sex-roles: Traditional or egalitarian?

Abstract

This article reports on the development of a Likert-type scale measuring attitudes toward egalitarian-traditional sex roles. A total of 484 undergraduates participated in six phases of the study. An item analysis study yielded 20 items with part-whole correlations <.48. The corrected split-half reliability coefficient is .91 (p≤.001). Five other phases of research show promising concurrent and construct validity. In particular, traditional attitudes are related to rigidity as measured by authoritarian, religious, same-sex touching, rape acceptance, divorce, and conservative attitudes. Overall, a varimax rotated factor analysis revealed one major factor accounting for 84.6% of the variance. Further, females were shown to have higher levels of egalitarian attitudes as compared to males.